Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Would you recommend moving from Google Workspace to Proton? Including emails and so on.


I'll give a different point of view.

I switched my personal email from Google Workspace to Proton. My use case wasn't privacy (especially when 99% of my email is sent to and received from people using Gmail, Office 365, etc.) I was interested in trying Proton more to support a plurality of service providers.

As such, I'm probably not Proton's target customer. That means the compromises Proton makes to enable E2E are not worth it to me.

Some examples:

* Search is like going back 20 years.

* The lack of automatic filtering (e.g. Gmail's automatically applied Promotions, Updates, etc labels) has made the signal to noise ratio in my personal inbox so low that I'm considering just taking the app off my phone or suppressing notifications, at least. I don't have the time to set up manual filters for everything that comes in.

* The lack of automatic filtering and decent search means that my personal email is now pretty much useless.

Similarly, it's pretty hard to migrate away from because you can't just use IMAP to shift your email history to another provider.

This isn't a negative review of Proton. This is just to say that choosing Proton Mail means living with the compromises necessary to enable their main feature (privacy) and I don't care enough about that one feature to make those compromises worthwhile (because my email is going through so many non-private services anyway).


Yeah this is why I chose Fastmail when migrating off Gmail - I needed something more usable, not private


Well, there are no (classical) office tools. There is a text editor, but no spreadsheet. Their "Drive" solution is very mvp, you can collaborate on text docs, but it's very minimal.

Email is great, looks great, fast, nice feature set. Calendar is mvp-ish, I can accept invites and they go into the calendar and they have nice links to Teams or Meet etc, pretty seamless. They also have widget for a iPhone now, but it's early days.

ProtonPass is great, at least as great as BitWarden, sharing credentials with family and colleagues is a lot easier (not that "organizations" stuff, just click, share, done).

My iPhone syncs pictures to Proton Drive, but the app needs to be opened to do that, which is annoying. Other than that, works well, pics are safe. I really want a Linux client and an API (or rsync endpoint?) so I can push backups there (I have 3 TB drive for the family/business combined).

Their Bitcoin wallet was wasted effort if you ask me, would have preferred video chat or something. Make it more like NextCloud with a dashboard perhaps.

But when they make a new product, it's mvp but generally immediately works very well. I have a lot of trust in their solutions to just work.

But you can use almost everything on the free tier, so just try it out! The migration tool also works really well.


Important to note that the migration works well one way only. If you later want to migrate out it'll be more painful.


Yeah, there are no export tools, but technically it would be up to the other party (like Google or MS) to make those right? When you want to go Proton -> Google ;)

I guess with the bridge you can move your mail uit via imap, the Drive you can just download it all. Calendar will be annoying I think because there are no open protocols like caldav (by design, and I do miss that!!!).




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: